About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Israel indicts two for murdering Dawabshe family

Amiram Ben Uliel (Times of Israel)

Israeli
prosecutors filed murder charges on Sunday against a man and a minor for an arson attack in the occupied West Bank that killed three members of a
Palestinian family and helped fuel the fiercest eruption of street violence in years.The attack on July 31 killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and his parents Saad and Riham.Amiram
Ben-Uliel, a 21-year-old from a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, was
charged with three counts of racially motivated murder at Lod court
near Tel Aviv. A second Jewish defendant, whose name was withheld due to
his age, was charged as an accessory.
Defence lawyers said the pair had given false confessions under torture in
close-door interrogations, an allegation denied by Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and the Shin Bet security agency. The
attack in Duma village and ensuing Israeli investigation laid bare
fissures in Netanyahu's coalition government, where one
ultra-nationalist partner voiced misgivings about the handling of Jewish
suspects.Thirteen other Israeli
Jews, most of them minors, were also indicted for hate crimes, including
assaulting a Palestinian, vandalism of Arab property and setting fire
to a church.
Referred to in Israel as "price-tag attacks", such offences have usually been carried
out in what the attackers say are reprisals for Palestinian violence
against Israelis or government curbs on unauthorized West Bank
settlement building.

Friends and family of Amiram Ben Uliel wait outside the courtroom. (Reuters)

Ben-Uliel, married and a father of a baby girl, recently became more observant, and he and his
wife are among the followers of Rabbi Eliezer Berland. Those who know him say he is a close friend of Meir Ettinger,the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who is considered one of the
prominent figures in the "Revolt" group that is behind a series of
Jewish terror attacks. Ben-Uliel's wife,
Oriyan, said on Sunday that her husband "went through serious and very
grave torture, during which they extracted confessions out of him of
things he did not do. I saw how they beat him mercilessly right in front
of me, and confiscated cameras so there wouldn't be any proof."
"He felt like he was about to die, they were simply without
mercy, while he was screaming they beat him and kept on beating him,"
she continued. "This confession is not worth anything because he didn't do it. I
know he was home that night. This entire story is lies and political
persecution," Oriyan concluded.
Ben-Uliel parents live in the settlement of Karmei Tzur in Gush
Etzion, and have not spoken to him since his arrest. His father Reuven
is a rabbi at a yeshiva in Karmei Tzur.
In a statement they made on Sunday, his parents said they were
"shocked and outraged by the suspicions attributed to our beloved son."
"We believe in our son's innocence, which will come to light at court, and hope that the court is exposed to the serious torture he underwent during the weeks of his interrogation," the parents said.

Saad Dawabsheh's brother Naser said he hoped the defendants would receive the maximum
penalty, but was skeptical of Israel's seriousnessin prosecuting the case."We have no trust in the
Israeli judiciary. They would not have launched an investigation were it
not for the international pressure on them," he said, accusing the
government of effectively "support(ing) the terrorism conducted by (West
Bank) settlers against our people".
The time it has taken Israel to crack down on the Jewish militants,
compared to the speedy and sometimes lethal response by state security
forces to similar actions by Arabs, has angered Palestinians,
contributing to a wave of stabbings, car-rammings and shooting attacks
against Israelis since Oct. 1.
Twenty-one Israelis and a U.S. citizen have died in the latest bloodshed, a number
that will rise if police deem a Tel Aviv shooting that killed two
people on Friday as a pro-Palestinian attack. The gunman, an Israeli
Arab, is at large.
Israeli forces or armed civilians have killed at least 145 Palestinians, 82 of whom
authorities described as assailants. Most of the others were killed in
clashes with security forces.